All three rangers met back up the next morning. They all made their way down to the computer room together.

Decker had booked time with one of the Tyrannis's sapient supercomputers. He was quite relieved that they were doing this on his lodge's mothership rather than Ophelia's; the sapient computers on The Ship With The Unnecessarily Long Name That All Kinds Of People Are Going To Be Inconvenienced By were a bunch of bedswerving practical jokers.

"I've been out in the black for the past few standards so I missed the news, but I hear now you two are famous," said Gagnon.

"I don't know about that," said Decker.

"Maybe Sam's not," said Ophelia. "I certainly am. Do you want me to send your implant an autograph packet?"

"What happened with that whole situation?" asked Gagnon. "I've heard conflicting stories. I figure might as well get it right from the horses mouth."

"You heard him, horse," said Ophelia, elbowing Decker lightly. "It was your dumb moment."

"Okay," said Decker, hesitantly, "so this was during the Old One proxy war, and the two rangers Ophelia and I were squiring under were operating out of Home/Click-Click-Click-"

"That's not how it's pronounced," interjected Opheila.

"There's only one planet in the entire sprelling galaxy called Home followed by a series of clicks," insisted Decker.

"Still, it's disrespectful," said Gagnon.

"Do you two want to tell the story or shall I?" asked Decker.

"No go ahead," said Ophelia. "I'll just interrupt whenever you're wrong."

"Anyway," continued Decker, rolling his eyes, "Ophelia was under a ranger named Usagi Helios. Apparently she and her Suit had discovered that the entire purpose of the proxy war was to serve as a distraction for an Old One expedition to the planet in question," Decker gave Ophelia a dirty look, "in order to look for a lost Inxon Data Tomb."

"Are you kidding me?" asked Gagnon.

"It gets better," said Ophelia.

"Eventually while pretending to be scouting the enemy Ranger Helios found the tomb and gained access. That's when she attacked Ophelia."

"Wait, she attacked a ranger? With a Suit?"

"Yeah," said Ophelia, the usual mirth missing from her voice.

"How? Why?"

"Like I said the Suit and her were in cahoots. They were both in agreement about the correct course of action. A Suit will only stop you from doing something against its own moral code, hence 'weapon with a conscience'. That's no protection from an ideologically compromised Suit."

"An ideologically compromised Suit..." repeated Gagnon, almost laughing at the absurdity of it.

Scary stuff nonetheless.

"Helios said she was going to use the Inxon technology inside the tomb to overthrow the Cooperative, I told her she was crazy, so she tried to kill me. Because she was 'disappointed in me'."

"Ophelia fled and found Ranger Aranath, who I was squiring under, and myself. She explained the situation and we went to confront Helios, whereupon she killed Ranger Aranarth. Blew him to pieces with some kind of non-mechanical Inxon mind tech.

"Ophelia and I tried to make our way back to our ship but when we got to where it had been left it was gone. We had no way to get off-world or contact A.R.C. So we didn't have any choice but to take matters into our own hands."

"You two were squires during all this?" asked Gagnon, amazed.

"Sam basically still is," said Ophelia.

"This is how we both got elevated to rangers, essentially," said Decker. "So we went to the Data Tomb and told Helios that we were on her side and that what she was doing was what was right for humanity, and she bought it right away. I guess she thought all along that she was going to be seen as a hero for what she was doing so our change of heart fit right into her derranged worldview.

"Once we were inside we were going to try and blow the whole thing up by just dumping all the antimatter my Suit had stored in hyperspace into the tomb."

"Well what happened?" asked Gagnon. The fact that they were alive made it obvious this wasn't the route they took.

"We tricked Helios into letting me contact the Neutronium Dragons Lodge Mistress, ostensibly to try and convince her that Helios was just looking out for humanity's interests. I was able to tip them off to the fact that because the tomb's walls were impervious to weapons it didn't have any defence fields. So they displaced the whole interior out into space."

"Blew out their field manipulators too," added Ophelia.

"Helios's mind-state was already so integrated into the Inxon tech that when it was destroyed it took her along with it."

"What, exactly, did this Helios person want to do with the Inxon technology?" asked Gagnon.

"Oh, the usual," said Ophelia. "Become head of A.R.C., conquer human space, end the non-interventionist non-expansionist policies of the Cooperative, flip the Parliament of Stars the middle finger."

"Eventually she moved on to overthrowing the Parliament," said Decker.

"Yeah only because you talked her into it," added Ophelia.

"Let's not nitpick the details of my brilliant last-minute plan that somehow worked."

"I see," said Gagnon, "that's quite a story."

"It's not really," said Ophelia. "People just get all worked up when the Inxon are involved."

"You only say that because I was the one who saved the day," said Decker.

"Oh really?" asked Opheila, crossing her arms. "And I suppose you think your baby-bird butt would have still been alive at that point if it wasn't for me? Or that you'd even have been a squire if I hadn't saved you two times during your trial?"

She held up two fingers so that Decker would be able to count how many times she saved him during his trial.

The door to the computer room slid open at their presence and the three entered.

"How old are you two?" asked Gagnon, skeptically.

"Quarter century," replied Ophelia, suddenly very casual.

"Wounds of Tellus no wonder you sound like children."

Ophelia wrinkled her nose but didn't say anything. It was the first time Decker had ever seen her speechless.

A giant cylinder of pitch black ultradense computronium, stretching all the way from the floor to the ceiling, sat in the center of the relatively small computer room. The walls were bare and there were no obvious controls anywhere.

"Hello Computer," said Decker.

"Greetings," replied the voice of the supercomputer, "My name is Rhyming Diamond. I would prefer to be addressed as such."

"Sure thing Rhyming Diamond," said Decker. "We've got a decent chunk of data we need a deep analysis on."

"Data analysis is both my profession and passion," replied Rhyming Diamond. "Please transfer the data over to me and I'll have a look."

Decker looked over to Gagnon, who nodded. Not needing to be told his Suit sent over all the Mandanadian files stored in its memory.

"Intriguing," said Rhyming Diamond almost immediately. "I am already noticing some interesting patterns here."

"Don't keep us in suspense," said Ophelia.

"These security logs tell a story. It's buried deep but once you start making the connections it virtually unearths itself. All the Mandanadian citizen who turned traitor and joined the Long Shadow had been off-station recently. In fact there is a relatively small window of time during which every single Mandanadian Long Shadow agent was off-station. I don't have any ship's logs telling me where they went but let me dig around in some networks for a bit. I have a theory."

"A bit", in computer terms, turned out to amount to less than a full minute.

"The sauce thickens," said Rhyming Diamond. "According to space flight records not only did they all leave the station at some point during the same time window, but their routes all passed through the same cubic light-year of volume. This is true for literally every citizen identified as Long Shadow in these records. I'll go ahead and mark the spot in your Suit's starmaps."

It did so.

"That's amazing," said Gagnon. "Thank you so much, you've been a tremendous help."

"Happy to do it," said Rhyming Diamond. "Nobody ever brings me anything interesting like this anymore. I miss the war."

Computers, thought Decker.